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Every iOS owner is faced with an important, life-altering decision: to jailbreak their device or not. If you’re not a fan of spending a ton of cumulative money on relatively inexpensive app purchases, you might want to turn to piracy; however, you can’t get pirated apps without jailbreaking your device and relinquishing any of Apple’s official features. Thanks to a Chinese piracy site, though, you can now obtain pirated apps on your device without needing to jailbreak.

Jailbreaking an iOS device isn’t difficult nowadays; it just requires you to click the mouse a few times and then find something to do while it installs. Current jailbreaks are relatively safe as well — if your device accidentally powers down during the installation process, nothing is harmed, and you don’t become the new owner of a fancy brick. The biggest downside to jailbreaking an Apple device is you regularly need to avoid updates — and thus, new features — because most major updates quash a previous jailbreak. Also, jailbreaking technically breaks Apple’s warranty, and when something goes wrong with your phone, you can’t dump it at the Genius Bar then go get a coffee while the technician fixes it. What makes the risk of jailbreaking a device worth it, though, is that you can pirate apps for your device, as well as run homebrew software. However, if you can bring yourself to trust a Chinese piracy site, you can now get those pirated apps for your iOS device without having to tactfully avoid any core updates by going through with a jailbreak.

The site, 7659.com, gets around the need for jailbreaking by cleverly working within the rules of Apple’s own bulk enterprise license. Once obtained, the license allows companies to sign apps, then send those apps to their own employees without having to deal with the official App Store. This can be used, for instance, for app development purposes. What Kuaiyong, the company behind 7659, appears to be doing is obtaining apps in whatever way (either a cracked or purchased version, which is unclear), then signing them with the enterprise license signature. Rather than distributing the apps solely to employees, the signed apps are made available on 7659 for anyone to download.

Now, Apple doesn’t want you to use this loophole in such a way. Apple’s own explainer on distributing enterprise apps states that a company should limit access to the distribution signature, which means the company is aware it can be used in the way Kuaiyong is. The likely reason you don’t see a US site doing the same thing as 7659 is, essentially, because China is a lawless land of piracy and copyright infringement. The reason why you, sitting at your computer desk in a place that isn’t China, can’t obtain and distribute signed apps like Kuaiyong is because you don’t have a legal business signed up for the bulk enterprise license. If you did have a legal business set up for that, you could technically make your own version of 7659.

Think of it like a Netflix account. You’re not supposed to give your Netflix account out to all of your friends, but you certainly can, and they can watch Netflix so long as your account doesn’t have too many registered devices.

The site offers apps for free that would otherwise cost money, including big-name titles like Final Fantasy V, which is normally priced at $15.99. Kuaiyong claims that the reason it launched the “store” is to provide Chinese Apple users with something of an App Store trial, as the Chinese market is supposedly so unfamiliar with operating Apple’s App Store that everyone needs a free App Store with which to practice. Not the most solid justification.

Of course, Apple will be looking into shutting down the piracy shop. If it still isn’t aware of 7659 after the internet’s recent coverage, just looking at the developer licenses floating around in its database should ring some bells whenever it sees the massive amount of licensing signatures attached to signed apps from just one company. Considering the pirated apps are installed on legitimate Apple devices, the company will need to find a delicate solution that doesn’t suddenly cut off all of the legal, non-jailbroken devices. It would be surprising if Apple didn’t revoke the enterprise license of Kuaiyong. Perhaps Apple should just make a simple Chinese language App Store tutorial, then wait to see what Kuaiyong’s new excuse for the store’s existence will be.

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